This week the tube workers went on strike, and the Telegraph called them “the enemy underground” and complained that “Putin apologists” had “brought London to a standstill”. It was the silliness, more than the vulgar opportunism, that caught the eye.
The tube was actually down because of a row over pensions and staffing levels. Two weeks ago, university lecturers were striking on the same principle, though more recently their actions have also been centred on the whole spectrum of declining pay and conditions – a pension raid is often just the most visible edge of a wider erosion of rights. Building a casuistic case linking union action to a brutal kleptocrat’s war, via a Morning Star subscription, is essentially an attempt to delegitimise unions altogether – and not even a serious attempt: more of a festive sidebar to the more sober main narrative.
The more conventional attacks on strikes in any sector follow the same broad contours: why should they get pensions and pay rises and job security when most people don’t? Why should a tube driver be paid £55,000 a year, or a GP £70,000, when most people earn less than that? Shouldn’t they pipe down if they’re so keen on equality?
The casualisation of the general workforce has intensified this dichotomy between unionised workers, with a proper employment contract that can form the basis of a dispute, and everyone else. Even before Covid, workers had been stratified into the self-employed, with no rights, the so-called limb (b) workers, with variable hours and very few rights, and the ones with full rights.
Post-pandemic, fire-and-rehire tactics have driven down rights and conditions even in jobs where those were a given, with the TUC reporting that nearly one in 10 workers had been told to reapply for their jobs or face the sack, and one in four saying their working terms had been downgraded since the start of lockdown. It’s a particularly harsh environment for the young. The Resolution Foundation found that a full third of 18- to 34-year-olds, if they lost jobs during the pandemic, returned to “atypical” work, essentially meaning zero- or variable-hours contracts.
Thus the anti-industrial action argument is distilled to its purest form: why should they be allowed to strike at all, when you can’t, and if you did, you would be instantly replaced, provided you were on the rota that day and anyone noticed you were striking?
It is astonishing how much speculative discussion has been given to the possibility that Covid (plus Brexit effects) might put an inflationary pressure on wages – to the extent that Andrew Bailey, the governor of the Bank of England, would enjoin good citizens not to ask for more money in these turbulent times – when the evidence was already there that pay and conditions for a significant block of employees had in fact been driven down.
Nonetheless, these arguments have traction: not only because solidarity is complicated in an era of insecurity and fragmentation, but also because industrial action was devised for industries. The original equation between capital and labour was very clear: the withdrawal of the second directly affected the accretion of the first. A modern strike, in a service economy, principally affects customers. Strikes have more collateral damage; they hit commuters, students, people working in hospitality, it creates millions of dissipated inconveniences and hardships rather than one big hit, not least for the strikers themselves. (Though this has always been true, I was amazed to have to explain to my teenagers, who are daft but not stupid, that striking workers don’t get paid, and the tube drivers were inflicting the most pain upon themselves, in defence of a principle and their present and future colleagues.) In an age where jobs with rights and the potential for strike action are concentrating in the public sector, the effects are mainly felt by citizens, rather than employers, to the extent that the collateral becomes the whole of the damage.
None of this is an argument against strikes. Particularly in view of the shameless anti-protest measures in the police and crime bill, it has never been more important to find new ways to exert collective power, and create strategies and allegiances. Sectors should be collaborating so that non-essential workers can strike on behalf of essential workers. Employees within organisations and movements could experiment with relay-strikes, so that the best paid jump first, and are hopefully disruptive enough that the worst paid never have to.
The wildcat strikes of recent history carry vital lessons on what you can withdraw besides labour. In the early 80s, the strike of chemists’ shop assistants in Bradford and elsewhere in West Yorkshire involved the staff protesting by giving out free prescriptions. The strike of the bureaucrats in unemployment benefits offices, also in the 80s, targeted the system not the claimants. School strikes have shown that you don’t need economic heft to make an impact. The combined climate and living wage strikes of 2019 dispensed with the idea of fighting one thing at a time.
What would have been the best way to show solidarity with the tube drivers this week? Not merely saying, “I don’t think they are, in fact, Putin apologists”; nor broadly defending their right to fight for the conditions they signed up to. But maybe to start exploring what industrial action looks like in a post-industrial age. It doesn’t have to look the same, only smaller.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
